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pendulum or the pressure of the floor on a weight resting upon it. Faith in this realm came from exercises in physical object visualization followed by manipulation of self-consistent algebraic symbols. I learned about experiments attesting to the “reality” of these ghostly fields (that now include electric, magnetic and strong and weak nuclear forces), and yet it was the physicists that already believed them who designed the machines to demonstrate them. It was Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead’s houseboy, lover, photographer and social anthropologist who said, “Newton didn’t discover gravity, he invented it.”

One college summer I found a second Isaac Newton, perhaps not so estranged from the first. He appeared in the form of a marble bust in the chapel of Trinity College at Cambridge University, holding the prism he had used to explore the polychromatic properties of light like a talisman. In his essay called Newton, the Man, the early 20th Century Cambridge Don and economic theorist, John Maynard Keynes, said that the Newton of the chapel followed “...certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher’s treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood.” Michael White’s biography, called Newton the Last Sorcerer, described his work as an attempt to integrate the magic of the Old World with the science of the New Age. Newton’s awe over what he saw as the wonders of the universe maintained him in private theological study throughout his life. Arthur Waite’s Alchemists Through the Ages describes how Newton’s alchemical orientation toward the earth’s fundamental substances such as fire, air, wind and water, their powers and potential for transformation, was joined imperceptibly with his metaphysics and physics. In his hands, experimental observations involving gravitation, celestial mechanics and optics, though motivated by esoteric alchemical theories, generated experimentally accessible phenomena and testable ideas.

The French mathematician, Jacque Hadamard, in his The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field, said that mystical preoccupations were never far from the minds of most of the English and European mathematicians and physicists of the 18th and 19th Centuries. This orientation served as an impetus for them to pay attention to the almost imperceptible whispers of their emergent thoughts. E.T. Bell, the historian of mathematics and mathematicians said even

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